Violet

32| Reality

Wet.

My cheeks are wet and my heart drums against my rib cage. The blackness subsides and I awake inside a tube. Sweat beads on my forehead, and my chest heaves rapidly. I try to move but I can't, I can't move, I'm strapped down. The more I try to, the more I physically can't.

I need to move! Did he make it?

The top of the tube opens, immediately blinding my eyes with light.

"Sebastian?!" I find myself choking out of my desert dry mouth, throat, and lungs. I weakly lift my hand to the edge of the tube, half paralysed, feeling an endless stream of tears running down my face, strands of hair getting in my mouth. "Where is he?!"

As my eyes adjust, I see doctors, nurses, and assistants all pace quickly around me. A few bends down to flash a light in my eyes, and another unstraps me. To me, their voices are no more than a buzz. I also notice that my arm is hooked up to quite a few beeping machines.

The sounds are drowned out.

I lift my head and try focusing my eyes on the tube now opposite me that the doctors and nurses are crowding around in front of, but the welled tears in my eyes make it nearly impossible. I try to blink them away. At last, it opens and more doctors rush over, obscuring my view. All the while, I groan and cry, my face warped in terror.

Machines beep louder, I hear a single voice loudly counting backwards from three, then a loud crack. I push myself at once, attempting to sit up when the thought hits me.

They are trying to restart his heart.

A pair of hands force my shoulders to lie back down inside the tube. Screaming, I try to resist, but I'm too weak. I fall back, raggedly sobbing. There must be a way, there has to be a way. I can't sit here and do nothing about it.

But I'm weak. I taste blood and I smell blood. I look down and see stains across my shirt.

Why am I bleeding!?

"He's breathing!"

"Let me see him!" I thrash around, struggling to shove against whoever is pushing me down, but I have already exhausted myself. More people with body suits on, walk past me carrying an empty stretcher.

"You never said this was part of the deal, you never said it was a game!" My eyes are frantic until they lock on the nearest doctor, she bends down to me, tears in her own eyes, trying to calm me down. "You said it was...." I trail off, my mind is foggy. I then see a syringe retracting from my arm, realising that she has injected me with something.

And the next thing I see is Sebastian's body being carried right passed me, laying on the stretcher. His eyes are half shut, blood smeared up against his face and into his hair.

Just for a second, his eyelids lift, and he looks at me, eyes dull. Everything else lays lifeless, just his eyes that move. I feel sick, I extend and lift my hand to try and reach his arm. But of course, it's useless.

Then he is taken away from view.

I let out one last sob, my voice reflects a raspy groan, cracking to a high-pitched cry, then to nothing more than an empty scream.

Heat rushes to my face, I don't know what to think. I don't know what to feel.

Now I'm angry.

The thought runs throughout my brain. The thought that I can't even comprehend, the underlying thought provoking me to scream and cry and groan and whatever sound that my mouth can produce because I'm scared, and I can't tell what is real and what is not real. I just can't. The thought, it felt too real, knocks me down again and again.

Why did it feel too real?

Was it real?

They promised me happiness, they promised me awe and they promised me money.

But they lied. They are liars. They set us up! Of course they did, they only wanted people to experiment with, to test their stupid machines and use us. To try to kill us.

I am so overwrought with emotions; I slam my head, hard, back on the inside of the simulator tube I'm lying on and blackout.

Follow your dreams they say,

But what happens when they turn into nightmares?